Criminally unfunny

Monday 25 March 2002 00:00 BST

How bored and irritated I am by the way in which contemporary plays like Peter Straughan's black farce Bones deal with the subject of gangsterism. Middle-class audiences are nowadays incited to laugh at stupid villains who enjoy a little heavy violence or lots of it, but have difficulty in thinking straight. The governing concern in these plays is to depict lurid scenes of savagery and to make our flesh creep or shiver. The best Revenge dramas by Jacobean playwrights are thick with horrors and sometimes induce uneasy laughter. But such sensational incidents are usually contained within a moral framework. By contrast, Bones, which particularly betrays the influence of Tarantino's Straw Dogs and Martin McDonagh's plays, is comedy without responsibility. There's not that much violence, but the simple aim is to inspire laughter at the expense of blundering criminals. I was in the unimpressed minority at Thursday's preview performance.

The play is set during the 1960s, though whether before or during the first flush of hippiedom and the dopey, flower-power movement, Straughan never tells us. A man claiming to be Reggie Kray, who, with his twin, Ronnie, was top gangster of the times, strolls into a near-bankrupt Gateshead cinema that shows unlicensed porn films. Within an hour of so of revealing his identity to Ruben, the young Jewish co-owner of the fleapit, this dread villain has drunk himself stupid, is stripped, tied up and blindfolded. For Straughan's black comedy is founded upon the farcical and unbelievable notion that a timid, amateur villain like Ruben would seek to hold Kray for £4,000 ransom so he and his brother Benny (Deka Walmsley) can pay their debts and ride off into some foreign sunset.

It's no surprise that Straughan, who has a real flair for villainous repartee, fails to draw much drama or comedy from this implausible scenario. That the cinema's two projectionists, first seen respectively dressed in a gorilla suit and as Tony Curtis's cross-dressing hero from Some Like it Hot, should conspire to kill Kray, takes the play deeper into the realms of unreality. The close of the first act, when Ruben puts his physical courage to a bloody test, raises no more than shudders of disbelief.

A secondary theme is in more doubtful taste. Questions about Ruben's tangled, personal history and his identity as a self-loathing Jew are raised, amidst anti-Semitic jibes, but never investigated. The climactic surprises blast home the reminder that Bones has no serious intentions and is not funny enough. At least Max Roberts's deft production is powered by Jonathan Singer's disturbed Ruben, who's fired by neurosis and tension, even while bonding with David Cardy's cocky, menacing Reg.